Mask Market

“No. There’s a woman living there; it’s her I’m interested in,” thinking, Michelle said she was one of us. “Interested in professionally.”

“Oh?”

“Michelle told you what I do for a living?”

“Well, of course. Like I said. You’re some kind of investigator, aren’t you?”

“An investigator who doesn’t know one end of this part of the country from another.”

“Toni the Chauffeur, at your service,” she said, saluting.

“I appreciate it, Toni. Very much. But this isn’t about finding a house as much as it is finding a way inside it, do you follow me?”

“In broad daylight?” she said, sliding the ’Vette through an intersection on the caution light.

“We’re not talking about a burglary here. I want to talk to the person who’s inside—who I hope is inside. Not because she’s the one I’m looking for; because she can…maybe…lead me in the right direction.”

“And you don’t think she’ll be, what’s the word you guys use, ‘cooperative’?”

“I can’t even guess,” I said, truthfully.

“So where do I come in?” Toni asked.

“I’m not sure yet,” I told her. “I was hoping you might have some ideas.”

“This neighborhood is first-tier,” Toni said, her sheer- stockinged legs flashing in the sun as she changed gears. “Not absolutely top of the heap—the plots are too small for that. But these are all seven-figure houses.”

“There’s slums in New York where you could say the same thing.”

“Oh, I know. Michelle showed me around the last time I was up. I couldn’t believe it.”

I looked down at the map spread open in my lap. “What’s a ‘crescent’?” I asked.

“If you mean when they use it for an address, it’s just a fancy name for ‘street.’ Probably shorter than most, maybe a cul-de-sac. How far…?”

“Next left.”

“How fast do you want to go by?”

“Like we’re just passing through. On our way to somewhere.”

“What number?” she asked, turning in.

“Twenty-nine.”

“Be on your side.”

The house was two stories with an attached garage. Dark green, with white shutters around the windows.

“Nothing special,” Toni said. “Four bedrooms, three baths, probably. But they spent seriously on the landscaping.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” I said. We were at the end of the block, and Toni turned the Corvette onto a slightly wider street.

“Those back trees are old growth,” she said. “The way the plantings were arranged beneath them, it’s almost like outdoor bonsai, with the flower beds and those hedges and all.”

“A privacy thing?”

“Could be. You think whoever you’re looking for could be staying there?”

“You should consider a change of careers,” I told her.

“You mean I’m right?” she said, flashing another smile.

“On the money.”

“Let’s get coffee,” she said.

“This is her?” Toni asked, holding the blown-up photo of Beryl Preston. The redhead’s long nails were beautifully manicured, heavy bracelets concealing wide wrists.

“Yep.”

“How long ago was this taken?” A woman’s question. A suspicious woman.

“I don’t know exactly. But she’d be in her early thirties now, so it looks recent, don’t you think?”

“Maybe,” she said, grudgingly.

“I was going to just walk up and see who answers the door. But…”

“What?”

“Well, you’re about the age of the girl I’m looking for. A bit younger, sure, but close enough.”

“Yes?” she said, widening her improbably greenish eyes.

“If you were to just ring the bell, and say you were looking for Beryl, who knows? Her mother—that’s the woman who lives there—might just call her downstairs or something. Hell, it might be Beryl herself who answers the door. She’s got no reason to think anyone would be looking for her here.”

“But she does know people are looking for her?”

“Oh yeah.”

“This isn’t a—?”

“What did Michelle tell you?” I said, letting my voice harden.

“I know,” she said, working her lips like she was making a decision.

I sipped my hot chocolate, feeling the minutes slow-click against the clock in my mind.

“Let’s talk outside,” she said.

“I was a runaway,” Toni said. “I didn’t know what I was, but I knew what I wasn’t. Do you understand what I’m—?”

“Yeah,” I said. And I did.

“I…My family had money. They sent me to…professionals. That didn’t work: I was still a girl inside, no matter what they called it. I was…I was sad, but I wasn’t suicidal. Until they sent me to the healer.”

I made an encouraging sound in my throat.

“It was a…They called it a Christian retreat, but it was a prison.”

“Because you couldn’t leave?”

“Because they had bars on the windows,” Toni said, fingering the tiny gold cross that caught a shaft of sunlight as it twinkled against her white sweater, standing between her prominent breasts like a warning. “Because there was no privacy. No privacy ever. Not even in the bathroom. Because they were afraid you might…do something to yourself.

“What I had…what I had inside me, they said that was being possessed. Satan had my soul. But if I worked hard enough, if I prayed hard enough, if I did everything they told me to, I could drive it all out.

“Only I didn’t want it out. I wanted to be…I wanted to be myself. Me.”

I nodded my head.

“At first, I kept that to myself. When I finally said it out loud, that’s when the beatings started.”

She shifted position, opening her stance like a boxer loading up to throw the equalizer. Her voice dropped into a metallic baritone.

“They called it ‘correction.’ The rod, right out of the Bible they made me read after each time. My parents never knew. Part of the program was that they couldn’t have any contact with me for the first six months. ‘Total immersion in the Lord,’ is what they called it.

“I was only fifteen. And sheltered, too—my parents had taken me out of school years before that. Because of my…problem. So I didn’t know much about the world. But it didn’t take me long to understand. They taught me a lot in that place. And the first thing I learned was, those beatings, they liked doing that. It was exciting for them. Got them all…you know.”

“I do know,” I said, reaching for her hand. She let me take it, but didn’t return the squeeze I gave.

“We were at the zoo. To see the baby pandas. It was like a field trip. Only for students who had been good. Obedient, they meant. I knew how to be ‘good’ by then. That’s when I ran.

“I knew I couldn’t go to my grandmother’s—she would have just called my parents. And I didn’t have any other place to go. I kept seeing New York in my mind. The biggest city in the world. Magic was there, I was sure of it.

“Michelle found me on my second night. I was looking for a place to sleep. These two men were…taunting